Why would half of America think the other half is not only imposing itself on the rest of the country, but doing it on behalf of ideas that have failed miserably?

The book that asked “why don’t Red states vote for their ‘best interests'” – like the people of Baltimore, Newark, Trenton, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Stockton, Saint Louis, Camden and Minneapolis did. Notice the cover, by the way; like any good delusional, the author thinks the donkey is carrying the elephant.

7 thoughts on “Tribes”

The condemnation, belittling, and mocking will continue until you join the side of the enlightened lovers of diversity. Then every little deviation from the constantly changing victimhood priority list will lead to even more outrageous condemnation, belittling and mocking since as one of the faithful you will be expected to keep up with the hourly changes.

Hey, all the “diverse” side wants is for all of us to think exactly alike and feel outraged at all who don’t. That shouldn’t be a problem in a “free” society, should it? After all, the universities have managed to oust discord from within their ranks, haven’t they? And universities pride themselves on being “free thinkers,” don’t they?

Tribalism and the breakup of nation states devoid of strong social bonds are the theme of this century. The rise of massive wars from the 18th to the 20th centuries gave us massive nation states needed to fight the world wars of the time. But the late 20th and early 21st centuries have a different reality. World wars are no longer seriously on the plate because of nuclear weapons, and the idea that you need to have a massive bureaucracy in order to command massive industrial responses to field huge armies is quickly fading. What’s becoming far more common are the low-level brush wars that we’ve seen since Korea, and those don’t really require massive, united responses that are cemented into place in a nation state, they’ve tended to be groups of nations acting with similar interests, which undercuts the idea of massive states where the social order of the constituents must be repressed for the good of all.

What we’re seeing emerge in nations today are the inevitable strains of groups who believe that their interests aren’t being served well by those big, massive states. Brexit is a direct result of the Brits not feeling that the EU has its interests at heart. The Scotts feel the same way about the Brits. Catalonia feels that the Castillians are bleeding them to support things that they don’t benefit from (and look for that referendum to be a real sh*t-storm if they manage to pull it off). Hungary and Poland chafe under the EU’s attempt to rule over them on social issues and could easily be pushed to exit the EU, too, so the EU is currently not trying too hard to exert its will.

Calexit and Texit show similar strains emerging in the US, where very different philosophies on the organization of social order are driving wedges into the monolithic state connecting them. We used to have an underlying social contract, but the rise of identity politics and a rejection of the old bourgeois values by almost half of society have severely strained those bonds.

Federalism would be a good answer for the US, but the vast expansion of the Commerce Clause to allow the Feds to overrule basically everything makes that a hard idea to see making a comeback. I suspect that the centralization of power at the Federal level will only be undone via a constitutional convention or a massive social rebellion even more powerful than the one the election of Trump has unleashed in Kali. We simply don’t have as much of a unifying social fabric as we used to, and while a “lavatory of states” could be the answer, it would require one side to unilaterally disarm itself once it won power over the other and I don’t see that happening.